Some incomplete notes, which I'll later turn into a proper post. I'm running on a 160-core Ampere Altra, but these instructions should work for any arm64 Ubuntu 20.04 system you have in mind. I'll try next on an 8GB Raspberry Pi for completeness. In order, you need the following: *... Continue reading

I have a couple of good sources of ambient noise, in order to give me some background sounds to think with or think against. In the attic, I have a scanner which picks up local ham radio traffic. Mostly in... Continue reading

Learning to solder looks like a good pandemic exercise. I was looking for soldering station kits with a wide range of tools that you'd need all bundled together. Bill Earl's [excellent guide](https://cdn-learn.adafruit.com/downloads/pdf/adafruit-guide-excellent-soldering.pdf) from Adafruit looks helpful. Of course in an... Continue reading

Working with folks in Europe and on the West Coast has taught me that the day starts very early and continues on until late in the evening. My lunch hour window (roughly 11 am to 2 pm) is also prime... Continue reading

This blog used to be a place where I'd write a few notes while out at a cafe, using wifi from wherever and having a cup of something strong to help move the keys across the keyboard. Now with the... Continue reading

There's a piece of me that was dreading the worst sort of violence, and it didn't come. I didn't watch the ceremonies but have been tracking the day one activities including the start of a purge of loyalists. The night... Continue reading

A few notes, late at night while I wait for the cups of tea to wear off. The song of the evening is "A Chat With Your Mother", Lou and Peter Berryman. "It's F-word this and F-word that". This is... Continue reading

More specifically, hockey as heard over AM radio, complete with scratchy reception and cross-channel interference. The biggest downside is the entire rest of AM radio, filled with hyperbolic and hate-filled politics. If you tune just a few kHz away you... Continue reading

When I total up the hours I spend on Twitter, I remind myself that this used to be time spent on other wasted social network pursuits (Usenet, MEET:STUDENTS, Facebook) and that eventually I stopped using each of them in turn.... Continue reading

Today was better than yesterday, if only because I got a few short naps into the day, and because I spent a bit less time [doomscrolling](https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/doomsurfing-doomscrolling-words-were-watching). But it was still not a good day. The challenge is that all the... Continue reading

Here's a few clips on Soundcloud from the BBC. [BBC World Service news on 7 January 2021](https://soundcloud.com/edward-vielmetti/websdr-recording-start-2021-01-07t01-03-44z-59450khz-1), a minute from a shortwave broadcast with news from Washington DC. The broadcast is from 5945 KHz, a service to Asia. [BBC Radio 4 on 8 January 2021](https://soundcloud.com/edward-vielmetti/websdr-recording-start-2021-01-08t05-08-31z-1980khz), three minutes from a longwave... Continue reading

It's important to write something down right now, even though there are a lot of things I don't want to write about. The events of the day reminded me too eerily of 9/11, starting with the fog of war. There... Continue reading

Sit with a cup of tea and write until the page is full. My apologies to anyone who reads this, it's not intended as a typical internet publication. Rather, it's an empty input box that is going to be filled... Continue reading

I have a Jetson Nano, which serves mostly as a DLNA music server. From time to time I log in and poke around. It's been slow to do its business lately, and some commands that should be fast are slow - very slow. How slow? Try 25 seconds of idle... Continue reading

My DMR hotspot was silent for some time because I had neglected to update it with a newly required password. The [Brandmeister network article on hotspot security](https://news.brandmeister.network/configure-a-security-password-for-your-hotspots/) has the detail that you need to carry this out. You'll want the "hotspot security" section of the "SelfCare" setting at Brandmeister, and... Continue reading

The new coffee pot in the house is a Bialetti "Moka Express". I am not positive that I have the best grind for it yet, but it makes a good cup of coffee. As a bonus, it's really cool looking.... Continue reading

I must be catching up from months of not quite getting enough sleep, because vacation time has so far featured a lot of naps! Even so I find it easier than ever to be awake at 6:00 a.m. or thereabouts. Continue reading

My notes such as they are say that I had OpenWebRX running last year around this time, but the 2019 experience was not accompanied by blogging and I have forgotten what I learned. This year's install was very simple, using the [Debian install instructions](https://www.openwebrx.de/download/debian.php) and then systemd to start and... Continue reading

A few notes, scribbled hastily, on the experience of installing containerd and removing docker from a system. The motivating factor behind this turns out to be the installation of faasd, which really wanted to run on top of containerd, and which notes in the [tutorial](https://blog.alexellis.io/faasd-for-lightweight-serverless/) > Do not install Docker... Continue reading

My magnum opus of published open source software is [sisyphus](https://github.com/vielmetti/sisyphus), which is a simple little shell script that produces a random pair of suggestions of things to do next. The observation is that the world is full of repeated tasks that never make it onto todo lists, and that being... Continue reading

Work at $DAYJOB has been very busy, so much so that the time for hacking on the menagerie of systems on my desk has been limited. Naturally there has been some bit rot here - systems that used to work, that no longer do. Fortunately, that's exactly the reason that... Continue reading

Mostly I'm drinking bottled cold brew, but I should really try some fancy coffee makers to see how they work. One thing that could work for espresso is a Moka pot. For cold press, consider an Aeropress. Quite honestly I... Continue reading

The Reuse Center used to be a warehouse full of reclaimed castoffs, a mish-mosh of home improvement items, old golf clubs, unloved books and music, and the very rare bit of electronics. Everything was priced to move, and we're sad that it's gone, having closed due to the current peculiar... Continue reading

The [jetson-ffmpeg](https://github.com/jocover/jetson-ffmpeg) package accelerates portions of the [ffmpeg](https://ffmpeg.org/) audio and video conversion tool on the Jetson Nano. My initial tests show 25% speedups on m4a conversions from files that originate on Youtube. The build process depends on having a current version of Jetpack software. My first attempt at building the... Continue reading